Exegy Bows Fifth-Gen Data Appliances, In-House NIC

St. Louis, Mo.-based hardware ticker plant vendor Exegy has released the fifth generation of its market data appliances, featuring a four-fold increase in processing capacity enabled by the introduction of a new, proprietary FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) network interface card.

The Exegy Network Interface Card (XNIC) is a new area of development for the vendor, which would previously buy third-party NICs, and was developed in-house, except for a time-synchronization component that leverages an integration with Austin, Texas-based clock synchronization technology provider FSM Labs’ Timekeeper product, which enables the XNIC to apply high-precision timestamps to every incoming data packet within 20 nanoseconds of the appliance’s system clock.

By being able to perform tasks such as arbitration, normalization and timestamping as close to the wire as possible, the XNIC directly contributes to a four-fold increase in input processing capacity, and a five-fold increase in the number of applications that Exegy’s ticker plant can distribute data to—from 40 to 200 applications, says Exegy CTO David Taylor.

“Before, we would very carefully select off-the-shelf NIC cards that we could perform low-level integrations with,” Taylor says. “But we identified long ago that we would need to take over building that component in order to do more processing next to the wire… which is what allows us to deliver the level of performance we achieved in this new generation of appliances.”

In fact, the vendor is evaluating the feasibility of selling the XNIC as a standalone product for firms that need its basic normalization and arbitration capabilities, but don’t need a solution with the additional functionality of a full Exegy ticker plant appliance, Taylor says.

In addition, the fifth-generation appliances leverage the latest semiconductor technologies from Intel (specifically, the former Altera business that Intel acquired), and contain more FPGAs than the previous generation of appliances—though Taylor declines to specify the exact number of FPGA cards they contain.

Before releasing the fifth generation of appliances into full production, Exegy tested them with a handful of early adopter clients among tier-one global banks with sophisticated agency businesses, and buy-side firms. Taylor says this enabled Exegy to test the new appliances in real-life, sophisticated trading environments that would have been expensive for the vendor to replicate in-house, and also allowed Exegy to provide those early adopters with metrics about the performance of their environments and fiber or wireless data handoffs to help clients optimize their own infrastructure.